


Destruction of an Ideal

by insecureAuthor



Series: A Changing Alternia [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Ancestor-Era, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Sadstuck, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-21 07:07:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6042640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/insecureAuthor/pseuds/insecureAuthor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Signless is tortured, but not to death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Destruction of an Ideal

**Author's Note:**

> This is a prequel to To Tear Down What She Built Up, a fic I started a while ago. I hope you enjoy.

Your name is Carmin, but most people know you as the Signless. The air smells of heat, of burning, it smells like the time your Disciple left a pan in your mom’s oven overnight on accident. Only this isn’t an accident.

There’s a crowd, gathered to watch you. Some cheer, some hiss, some boo. It looks much the same as the crowd that watched you speak, and you think you even recognize some faces. They won’t make eye contact with you, and they pretend not to know you. You can hardly begrudge them that, seeing how the people who tried to defend you ended up.

They’re chained some distance away from you, which is a mixed blessing. You’ll die without touching them ever again, but at least you can reasonably assume that they won’t be burned like you will.

In the fire by your feet, the shackles continue to heat up. They passed red a while ago, and are now a golden yellow that makes your eyes water to look at. The heat even this short distance away is intense, and you try not to think about what it will feel like when they touch you.

Someone is talking to the crowd, a big troll with huge horns and hair, they have been this whole time. You can’t bring yourself to pay attention, really. You’re about to die. Everything else seems unimportant. You catch a few of his words and phrases, “treason,” “heretic,” “glory to the Empire.” It’s all fairly generic. They want to make a show, but they don’t want to make a martyr.

You close your eyes, sickened by the bloodthirsty cries of the crowd, your mother’s blank expression, Disciple and Psii’s incoherent rage. You had always known it would end this way. You were a Seer, and besides that, it was only common sense. Rebels live short lives.

Someone snaps the burning orange shackles on you, using thick protective gloves, and for half a moment, you feel nothing.

That doesn’t last long.

You scream.

You scream incoherently until your throat hurts, and that man, the one who spoke before, is laughing. He’s not even laughing at you, you see when you open teary eyes. He’s laughing at trollmom. He’s laughing at how upset she is, and he leans in to whisper in her ear and you can just imagine what he’s saying, you’ve met this character before and he’s singularly unpleasant. “ _Hey lil’ mama. Sad ‘bout the loss of your little bedwarmer, huh? Yeah, bet that little thing was real nice and warm, but don’t worry, I’ve got somethin’ right here for ya_ ,” you imagine him saying. He grabs his crotch, and you know he must be saying something like that. You see red.  You scream, and scream, and only distantly realize you’re actually saying words.

It certainly isn’t you at your most eloquent, nor your most compassionate. Hell, you’re barely coherent through most of it. But damn if you aren’t apparently fascinating as fuck. The crowd quiets. The huge troll is staring at you. Everyone was staring at the shackles before, because trolls are idiots, and ooh, shiny, but apparently this is more interesting. You shout until your throat burns, until you physically can’t go any longer. You talk about a lot of things. You talk about fucking piece of shit highbloods, about the bulgewrangler who’s still way too close to your mom, about Psii, and how he didn’t deserve half the shit he got.

(None of you deserved half the shit you got.)

About how mind-numbingly terrible the Empire is, about how selfish whatever douchebag who turned you in is.

You ramble on and on and on, about how you didn’t even fucking do anything, about how if they’d just left you alone you would have fucking died and nobody would remember you, but now they’ve done exactly what they didn’t want to do and created a martyr, and given him a platform to speak-

The huge troll’s eyes flash indigo, and you’re out. Before you go under (gods-damned highbloods with mind control powers, how is THAT fair,) you hear him laughing with the crowd, cracking a few jokes about how throwing that tantrum must have tired you out, or maybe it’s past your ‘coontime.

He doesn’t get very many laughs, and it may be incredibly petty, but you slip into unconsciousness grimly satisfied. You got to say your piece, and you bet people will whisper about it tomorrow.

 

You wake up just before dawn, which is startling, because you didn’t expect to wake up at all. Your head pounds, your throat aches, your eyes feel like they’re full of sand. Your wrists hurt less than expected, which probably means nerve damage.

They just left you out here in the sun, to suffer and be torn to bits by beasts.

“Yes, they did,” agrees a strange voice, “But you won’t be.”

You struggle to get your eyes open and focused on the speaker, but when you manage, you sigh and close your eyes again. It’s just the Demoness, one last hallucination to give your pain-addled brain some hope.

“I am not a hallucination,” she insists, gently but firmly.

You struggle to get enough moisture in your mouth to speak.

“Yeah, you’re th’ _real_ Demoness.”

She doesn’t look that much like the depictions of the Demoness, really. Yes, those horns are distinctive, but it isn’t like spiraled horns are uncommon. Her outfit, rather than looking like real East Alternian clothing, looks like a fantasy costume, designed to make her look good. Her dress has a long trail, and it seems like it would trip her if she tried to walk anywhere, and the tufts of hair that weren’t cut into a short bob were almost long enough to cause the same problem. She laughs. It isn’t at all like you’d expected a Demon to laugh, it isn’t dark, or sardonic, or smug. She just seems amused.

“You’re entirely correct about my outfit, you know. It’s entirely for appearances. It doesn’t even have pockets, did you know that?”

You’re having a dying conversation with the Demoness. That itself isn’t too unusual, if you believe in Her, but the conversation you’re having on your metaphorical death bed is about fashion. Your life is weird right to the end.

“You aren’t going to die, you know.”

She sounds perfectly matter of fact, like she isn’t saying something blatantly false.

“’M lying in the sun after bein’ declared an enemy to the empire. I’m pretty clearly gonna die.” You’re supposed to die. You’ve known all along that you would. You’ve been having dreams of the other Alternia since you were young, and dreams of this one began shortly afterwards. You dreamed of your execution when you were five, and woke up in tears, knowing it would come true.

Except… it didn’t.

That was a vision, you know, but it didn’t come true. You were supposed to be shot with an arrow in the side, you weren’t supposed to die in the sun. Your shackles have long since cooled, though your wrists still hurt, and you gingerly touch your ribs. You feel the ghost sensation of the arrow that should have been, and you shiver.

When you look up at the Demoness, something clicks.

“Damara?”

She smiles, and it’s warmer than you’d expect from the person she was on the other Alternia.

“Not anymore, no more than you’re Kankri. This timeline is doomed, but it will last for a while yet. You can change it.”

She lays a hand on your shackles and before your eyes, they rust away and crumble to dust.

“There’s a cavern system nearby. It has pure springs and edible mushrooms. Go, hide away for a bit. You’ll find what you need eventually.”

You blink, and she’s gone.

No time to think about it. You pull yourself to your feet, tears welling up in your eyes from the pain. Every move is agony, but daylight is fast approaching. You manage to drag your sorry carcass into the entrance to the cave system she talked about. A small stream flows out towards the open air, and you collapse with your face in it, sucking up all the water you can. Grit stings your cheek, you scraped your knees, and the water you can get seems fairly silty, but it doesn’t matter. You thought you’d appreciated the concept that water is life after growing up in the desert, but you have a whole new level of appreciation. Every drop of the cool liquid feels like healing.

You spend most of the day with your face halfway in the stream. You’re just too exhausted to move. You try a couple times, but your limbs turn to jelly before you can make any progress. Sprawled out in a cave, face in cold water, burns aching, you sleep.

 

You live in those caves a long time. There isn’t just edible fungus, but fat tuberworms that multiply in abundance, and in places where moonlight can reach through tiny cracks high above, there are even plants. You find one of these treasured patches of light nearby the source of a pure spring. In the earth under the stars, several starchflowers grow, and you cultivate them as best you can, using what your trollmom taught you. Starchflowers are edible, and if you can manage to keep them growing, they can sustain you. Maybe they’ll even keep you in one place for a while.

You are tired to your very soul of wandering.

 

Your starchflowers grow impressively well underground, and there’s a nearby tuberworm colony too stupid to move, so you set up camp. It’s a pretty pitiful camp. You have some dried grasses bundled up for a place to rest, and a sharp rock, and that’s pretty much it.

Your comforts are lacking, but you’ll live.

Despite the Empress’ best efforts, you’ll live.

 

You’ve been wandering the caverns for almost a sweep, creating a map on the wall, and you still haven’t entirely figured them out. They’re huge, and that’s part of it. Many sections of cave look almost exactly the same, and though you’ve gotten adept at finding miniscule differences or leaving marks for yourself, it still trips you up sometimes.

This room doesn’t look the same as all the others.

There are drawings on the wall, some crude, some detailed, as well as scratched in writing. It’s all in olive blood or beast (red, your) blood, and you’re ready to pass it off at the workings of some ancient cavetroll when you see your name. Your name, your title, and your color. Even some of your speeches are replicated from someone’s memory.

Your heart soars, then sinks. It could be your Disciple. If it was her, though, what kind of life would she be living down here? You’ve barely kept yourself sane, and she was far more outgoing than the rest of you combined.

Living down here, alone…

Of course, the solution to that is to find her.

You don’t dare let yourself hope, but you remember the room, and mark it on your map. You go back to the dead end little cavern every night, if only briefly, hoping she’ll return.

She doesn’t, but you find her anyways.

You’re exploring the edges of your little home, looking for resources. Your clothes are shorter than you consider decent, as you keep tearing the bottom inch off to make bandages or slings. You’ve been clumsy since what was supposed to be your execution, you think you have nerve damage. You need more cloth, and you refuse to tear up your cloak too much. It’s just too useful. So you scavenge for any scraps of useful fabric or hide.

You enter a chamber with very little of the bioluminescent fungus so common in other parts of the cave. It’s fortunate troll eyes are so well suited to the dark. You see a large hide that’s clearly been cleaned. It’s bigger than most things in the caves, it almost looks like an antlerbeast skin. You crouch down, and reach out to feel it.

Something hisses behind you. You turn, alarmed, only to be tackled to the ground.

Yellow eyes glow in the darkness. It’s a troll, but it’s gone feral. The long and ungroomed claws are proof of that, as is that enormous mane of matted hair, but you recognize this troll.

“…Tabita?”

She hisses again, baring teeth. It takes most trolls longer than this to go feral, but then, she was feral when you found her. It only makes sense that she’d go back to her old ways after what happened.

“Tabby, it’s me. Do you remember…?” You reach up to pap her cheek, but freeze when her teeth meet your wrist. She could kill you like this. What an end, surviving your execution, only to bleed out under the love of your life. Only she isn’t biting down.

She stares down at you, considering.

When she gently releases you, careful not to nick you with her fangs, you let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding.

“Kitten.” Her voice is soft and rough, she seems like she hasn’t spoken this whole sweep, but she remembers your nickname. You start to cry, and she licks your cheek. “Shhh. Kitten’s okay.” The two of you embrace, and lie on the deerskin together for the rest of the night.

 

She slowly regains her trollhood, and gets gradually less feral. Your trollmom was the only one who could get her to be entirely civilized, but she remembers to talk in full sentences again, and to groom herself, and to wear some semblance of clothing, which is a relief.

She even gets better enough to go out and trade for supplies, something you can’t do. Her horns are fairly generic, but yours? Everyone knows your little nubs, now. The two of you set up a home some distance from your farm. There’s a small tunnel leading outside, too small for everynight use, but perfect for emergencies. She can’t get you ‘coons, but she gets cots and sopor patches, some spices, some jars and bottles to hold food in. It isn’t much, but it’s a home. It’s certainly paradise compared to how you two were living apart.

You ask about trollmom and Psii, but she says she doesn’t know. They were probably executed after she ran away. You can hardly ask around about it, so you try to ignore the heavy weight in the pit of your stomach.

 

She ages. You don’t.

Her skin darkens, her horns grow, she gets wrinkles. She starts to joke about old trolls and creaky joints, but they aren’t jokes for long. She’s old, for an oliveblood, and you had a lot of time together, but it still comes as a shock when she doesn’t wake up one morning.

You go up to the surface. You burn her body. You cry.

You cry for a very long time.

 

Occasionally, other trolls come. At first, you worry about being recognized, but it’s been over fifty sweeps. All the highbloods who witnessed you are off serving in the glorious Empire’s military, and the lowbloods are all dead. They bring you news, and current events. One of them seems to think you’re embarrassed about your horns, and teaches you how to carve and paint a fake set to go over your real ones. You’ve long since gotten over horn envy, but they make you feel more comfortable walking around on the surface, or interacting with people. You still fear that someone will recognize you.

You hear of a new rebellion, one with riots and violence. You don’t get involved. You know how it will end, and it ends. Adults get kicked off Alternia, which you didn’t See, but you still look young enough not to arouse suspicion when you get a visitor.

One of your visitors keeps coming back to you, speaking quietly seditious words in your ear. He wears a necklace with a symbol that looks like the shackles they used on you, and you can’t keep your eyes off it.

He asks if you know who the Sufferer is.

You don’t.

He explains.

You ask that he leave at once.

Your story is still told, but what a twisted version. Your hateful speech that you made while being tortured is more important to these people than your life’s work. They don’t know your mother, they don’t even mention her except as your caretaker, like all she did was feed you, when she’s the reason you began preaching in the first place. You avoid lowbloods wearing splashes of red, freeze when you see that necklace, choke up when someone makes a horrible imitation of those shackles with their hands as a greeting.

You avoid "Sufferists", as they call themselves, as much as possible. Everyone on planet is a child, and you feel so alone.

 

You wait, and wait, and wait.


End file.
